OK, Boomer: you’re golden. It’s the 50th anniversary of your last 50th anniversary

Now that the 2010s are drawing to a close, so too are the endless 50th anniversaries of Every Single Thing That Happened in the 1960s.

Many of those events were undeniably terribly significant: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, and so on.

The 50th anniversary of Barbie maybe not so much.

Baby boomers, who still currently control everything including the 2020 presidential election field (wait, no…they’re even older), just love their commemoration of the cool and not so cool things that they experienced, and feel the need to share it with increasingly exasperated GenXers and Millennials.

OK, Boomer. Enough already.

One would think that the oldest boomers born in 1946 would go away. Oh, no. Three of the last four U.S. presidents were born in 1946. We took a brief intermission for generational change (Barack Obama, 1961), and then went right back to a choice between 1946 (Donald Trump) and 1947 (Hillary Clinton), again.

Some of my best friends were born in the 1940s. I cherish them and their never-ending recollections of draft deferments, acid, the 1966 Mustang that cost $3,000, mescaline, Ike, acid flashbacks, what is was really like when Ten Years After did “I’d Love To Change the World,” acid, rabbit ears on black and white televisions, and acid flashbacks. Oh, and memory loss from acid.

But having had to relive their memories over and over again (full disclosure: I am incredibly young, born in 1960, and three months from my IRA) seems to be, well, like being on acid.

Look, I love the 1960s in many ways. I watched Mad Men as a documentary; I can still remember the romantic days of my parents smoking Pall Malls and Kents in station wagons with the windows rolled up to this second. Oh, it was great back then.

Cars broke down after three years, Nixon was president (he was much better at this sort of thing than Trump ever was), people ate Spam, Froot Loops, Twinkies, Tang, Space Food Sticks, Kix, and the bulletins from the JFK assassination were interrupted by commercials for Nescafe instant coffee and Armstrong Floor Wax.

Hell, there was even a Maxim instant coffee commercial SIX MINUTES before Apollo 11 launched on CBS.

You know, an era worth commemorating.

But the Re-Sixties are drawing rapidly to a close. People my age and older are about not to control the news media, at all, even Rupert Murdoch (1931). In fact, as I look around our own newsroom, reporters born about the time I last cleaned out my refrigerator (1996) will take control. Then what will we commemorate?

Eventually, the 50th anniversary of This Major Event or That Epochal Moment will just be something from 1977.

“Tonight on CNN: A Look Back at Betamax.” No. They will not do that.

People from Planet 1996 do not care about the 50th anniversary of the Slinky, the 50th anniversary of the Wham-O Superball, the 50th anniversary of the Mattel Thingmaker, the 50th anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven, the 50th anniversary of the Schwinn Fastback, or any 50th anniversary of anything that we baby boomers really care about.

Eventually, and I know this is very difficult for baby boomers to hear, the kids will not cater to us in any way whatsoever.

We will, if we are very — and I mean very — actuarially lucky, get to watch the 50th anniversary of Pokemon Go, the 50th anniversary of the Furby, the 50th anniversary of Britney Spears, the 50th anniversary of the iPhone, the 50th anniversary of Whatsapp and Kik, and you know what?

We will deserve every single second of having to watch those things, because we made them watch them.

Endlessly. For decades. Five decades, to be precise.

I can take that. I can. But, please, please, please.

No more presidents from 1946.

No one deserves that.

This story was originally published December 14, 2019 at 7:00 AM.